Hey there listeners!
Welcome back to you’re listening to radio revel, Season four. This is another episode in the Tall tales series, stories of mine that I’ve dug out of old notebooks, revisited, given a fresh face. Today I’ve got two very short stories I wrote in 1987 while living temporarily one summer in Madrid, Spain. They reflect things that caught my eye, Spanish women, yet living out lives dictated by generational social norms. There’s something about the Spanish woman that defined for me just how the culture differed from my own.
Walking the dog
It was 11:30, time to take the dog out for his walk. Tonight she realized that calling it “walking the dog” was pretty silly, everyone knew that the reason you took the dog out was so he could pee in a doorway and shit in the middle of the sidewalk, the walking part was simply part of the means to an end. The next morning some young man walking briskly to a motorbike rental shop would step in that pet waste, scrape his foot along the sidewalk for a city block, knowing that they wouldn’t rent him the motorbike because his foreign license wasn’t valid for that, though he hoped that the shop owner wouldn’t notice that detail, the license was foreign after all.
She was wearing a blue flower-print cotton house dress, she’d been hot all day, smelled because someone like her, having put out three babies in five years was transformed from frilly to fat. She always lost the battle with body odor, the activity of her day kept her moist and warm where the skin overlapped upon itself. Her hair was yet totally black, the fat she carried smoothed out any wrinkles on her face, but in the past years her husband had gradually taken to prostitutes, picking up something that later would make her hair thin until she would wear a wig even on the hottest days. She’d also go a little crazy, become obsessed with snooping on her neighbors, shouting out the window at them on the silliest pretexts, maybe the smell of a potato omelet being made with the kitchen window that gave onto the shared inner air shaft patio open, or the TV blasting a game show audience’s applause too loudly. Or maybe she would scream at her misunderstanding children on the phone until they hung up on her, then scream at the phone itself.
She was still sane tonight, as she walked with the dog. Tonight her husband had again stood after dinner, announced that he was meeting some friends down at the bar, put on his jacket and locked the door behind him as he left. Because her husband went out nearly every evening, she never had to answer any of the questions so many of her friends had to answer their husbands. They (the husbands) all knew very well that they (the wives) were simply taking the dog out. What made them always ask – What are you doing? She never got that question.
She did not mind that her husband slept out. Three babies had been enough, she had always known that her lot was of her own making. She had convinced herself that accepting how her life was was the correct thing to do, so she accepted it. She ran the household, small though it was, by her rules, rules adapted from her mother’s rules, loosely applied most of the time, more strictly followed when her mother, quite argumentative and set in her ways, came from the village in November to stay with her daughter in town in order to save money on winter heating costs.
The dog was a huge German shepherd, her husband had brought the puppy home without consulting her and immediately left the responsibility of pet care in her hands, the feeding, the bathing, the brushing, the walking. She would have liked a kitten, but quickly realized that having a cat would never give her the excuse to go out at night, stroll the streets for half and hour, look at the young, careless people headed to bars, to dance clubs, to simple dates with a new love. She did not miss that youth, did not even envy them theirs, she simply pretended for a bit that she was one of them, of their age, of their lives, of their interests. As she walked with the dog her life changed for a moment, seemed what it wasn’t.
The night was brisk, the northern hemisphere had begun to tilt away from the sun, the pavement struggled to hold the day’s heat after twilight. She wished she had pulled on a sweater before heading out. The air was too chilly, really, for this old house dress. It was thin, only meant for indoors. Ahead on the dark street, leaning against a doorway, a young man stood, he wore yellow pants and a flowing yellow shirt, he smoked a cigarette, he wore gold glasses, he looked at her breasts as she passed by, she blushed and thought of her oldest son, how painful breastfeeding had been, his having grown teeth rapidly and early. She then felt she was a teenager again and straightened her shoulders, pushed those breasts forward, understood their power over young men. The dog pulled her over to the middle of the sidewalk and squatted.
Last summer the dog had caught some stomach, bowel bug, screamed each time it was walked, always blood, but the vet had given her some medicine and a diet and after only a couple of weeks he was healthy again, the pain with each stool forgotten. As she walked by the young man in yellow in the doorway, another young man joined him, they spoke a moment, not even noticing her and the large dog, they then walked off together in the opposite direction as she was headed. She hoped they would be careful where they walked.
Her husband was home when she got back to the apartment, he was unusually friendly to her, he pet the dog, shared a bottle of beer and some olives with her, then, somehow regretfully, excused himself again to go out to meet some other friends at another bar. So, had he told her the truth the first time he went out? Had he met with some friends, drunk a beer or two, maybe sat a game of cards? Was this second outing the one that he’d be lying about? It didn’t matter to her. She did not wonder or ask who his friends were. He had never beaten her, never cursed her, always did what she asked without complaint, she never asked much of him. While he was out she could watch television for an hour or so, watch the program she liked while she pressed some shirts. Later, she would bathe, then go to bed. She liked the bed to herself, she could really spread out.
Dolores
The telephone rang ten times and then stopped. A couple of minutes went by and it rang another eight times, then stopped. A television was on somewhere in the building, a window open, the entire neighborhood could hear the sounds of a child that ran through the shattered streets of a city shouting – mama! mama! – and then stopped as someone switched it off abruptly just as the second set of rings from the telephone stopped. There was a strange silence for a few minutes, then the phone rang again, stopping this time on the third ring, as Dolores angrily plucked the receiver from its cradle and held it up to her ear, shouted “Yes? Who is it?” into the heavy black plastic.
Her son had shown his friend pictures of Dolores in an old, musty family photo album. Though the photos were faded and yellowed, the friend could see that she had been quite an attractive youth, black hair twisted into elegant braids around the crown of her head, lace around her breasts, pearls around her throat, on her earlobes, a comely dress that showed her curves, sweet little slippers enclosing sweet little feet. She looked at the camera with huge, dark eyes that were gleaming with moisture, a small mole near her mouth that she needn’t paint on, it had appeared on her pale cheek when she was ten. The blacks and grays and rusty aging of the photo suggested that someone had said something right before the shutter opened and shut that had made her blush. Dolores didn’t remember having sat for the picture some seventy years earlier so couldn’t say what had been said.
Dolores did remember each and every one of the anniversary photos though. For fifty odd years, even after they had separated ten years before his death, Dolores had dutifully called on her husband, coerced him into accompanying her to the photo studio and have a photo taken together. After the first anniversary portrait that covered an entire page in the album, the pictures became smaller and smaller, each pasted with little black corner tags, each next to the one from the year before, all but one next to one from the following year. She always sat to her husband’s left, always wore lace around her breasts, the pearls around her neck, the braids around the crown of her head. He seemed to always wear the same suit and tie. It was the same picture fifty times over, with only changes in the number of wrinkles or warts or discolored cheeks or gray hairs.
Despite the sameness of each picture, her son’s friend thought that he could easily pinpoint moments in the life of the married couple he had not met personally: which years they had had children, the year the husband had taken his mistress, the year she had found out, the year his mistress had given birth to a boy, the year her husband had finally moved out. And of course, the blank spot that signaled the beginning of a series of blank spots and pages, the year he had made her a widow. From then she didn’t see any reason to have a portrait done alone, she never set foot in a studio again and prohibited others from taking her picture candidly.
Dolores was now over ninety, she was no longer a beautiful woman. She was actually quite ugly, always dressed in black, with black lace around her neck, the pearls were stashed away in a box in the drawer under her old-woman girdles and cotton underthings. Gone were the braids she had plaited herself each morning: her white hair pulled angrily upon the top of her head into a bun that seemed to be stretching her forehead to the back of her neck. She had traded her sweet slippers for mean, tired little black pumps that strangled her grossly swollen feet, making her ankles overflow, strain at the stockings she wore instead of the compression socks her doctor had ordered. Dolores had to walk around her apartment a lot, if she did not, her legs would cramp in the night, the pain taking three to seven days to retreat. Her beauty had gradually slipped away as her bitter attitude about life grew. Dolores was an ugly old crone either because it best suited a woman with such an ugly temper or maybe despite that temper.
The closest Dolores came to relaxing from her constant ire at everything was manifested in a huge sigh, – oye! Any eavesdropper might first think that Dolores had finally resigned herself to her end, her final rest, until any eavesdropper would recognize the sound of a chain pulled and the rush of water through the pipes. Dolores would live another day.
Dolores pulled a small notepad and pencil from a drawer next to the kitchen sink and made a list for her youngest son, Juan, to take with him when he went out to do the shopping. The list contained only one item: potato chips. Dolores felt she had to make this one-item list because she had convinced herself that Juan had grown into something of a dullard. She didn’t understand that Juan had trained himself to seem stupid, he purposefully forgot things and errands, sometimes didn’t run the errand at all, spending the time out in the street walking around the block and making up contrived, nearly unbelievable excuses for his faked ineptitude. Though Juan had hoped that seeming retarded to his mother would eventually relieve him of the errands, this did not happen: Dolores felt that the errands somehow helped keep her slow-thinking son sharp, so she always “forgot” something herself when doing the daily shopping, and her legs always conveniently swelled up just before Juan arrived home from work. So Juan always had to run to the shop to pick up something or other for his mother.
Juan wouldn’t be home for another hour, but she wanted to write that item down, “potato chips”, before it slipped her mind. As she was scrawling out the two words with her twisted fingers on the pad on the kitchen table the phone rang that first time, she simply wasn’t fast enough to finish the note and then reach the entry hallway where the devilish, noisy black thing sat on a small table. The second time the phone rang, the eighth chime coincided with not only the neighbor’s TV being shut off, but also over her sigh – oye! – Now that she had efficiently taken care of the two priorities, the shopping list and the bowel movement, she sat herself carefully on the tiny wooden chair near the telephone, which was near the window near the front door, a window that gave out onto the tiny light shaft courtyard where one of the boys who lived in the building parked his black moto, even though the building rules did not permit so.
People always called back. Everyone she knew knew she never left the house anymore, except for the morning shopping run. She looked out the window at a line that stretched across the courtyard. There were two pairs of panties and a large bra hanging out there now. While waiting on the phone, she leaned forward, reached out and felt one of the cups of the bra, unpinned it, the phone rang, she finished folding the bra and picked up the receiver on the third ring. It was Juan.
– Mother, I won’t be coming right home from work this evening. Did you want me to pick anything up for you?
– Listen, do you think you can remember to bring potato chips? Do you have a pencil and paper?
– I have, mother.
– Listen, write potato chips on the paper and put it in your pocket where you always put your hand. Listen, don’t be coming home at 8:30 and saying all the places are shut. The one downstairs is open until 8. Don’t have an excuse prepared.
– Of course, mother. I’ve written it and put it in my pocket.
Which he had.
His mother told him a few more things, she always had something to tell you. She was a woman who felt her words were of benefit to anyone within earshot, she simply did not believe there could be opposing views to hers, she ignored any dissent even when it was said directly to her face. Juan fancied that some of her friends were merely her friends because they got pleasure watching her skill in sticking to her guns. She never said “maybe you’re right”, or “I don’t know”. Her favorite phrase was “I already know that” and this, along with “listen”, laid dividers between themes in her tiring monologues.
Juan had had a revelation that day at work. He was moving papers from one inbox into another outbox, looked up, listened to and then agreed with his supervisor about something he promptly forgot, he suddenly thought that he understood why his father had left his mother.
It had been abrupt. Juan’s father had played his role in the family drama for decades, always went to work, always brought the paycheck home, always provided. One day though, Juan already well on his road to 30 years of age, Juan’s father simply didn’t come home. Days passed, his mother uncharacteristically had nothing to say about the absence. Finally, Juan ran into his father at the bar on the corner near his workplace. Juan hesitated a moment, wondering if he should approach his father, ask him where he’d been. Then a woman came from the restrooms, gave Juan’s father a kiss on the cheek, sat at the table and took his hand. Juan felt he had his answer without even having to ask.
At first Juan had hated his father for this abandonment, for having had another woman, for leaving him alone at home with Dolores. Yet after years of trying to ignore his father’s new wife, he had grown to tolerate her. He never formally met her, always crossed the street to the other sidewalk if he saw the couple coming towards him, had never spoken with her. Nor had he spoken to his father all those years. What he thought of that woman though changed the day she had called him at his office, asked him to come to their apartment, it was important.
He’d hardly knocked when the door opened and that woman, with a pained look on her face, began speaking at once.
– There’s something wrong with your father, he won’t wake up. Go look at him.
From the bedroom door Juan could see his father stretched out on top of the bed, no clothes on. Juan could only think to say:
– There’s nothing wrong with him.
And Juan was right, his father was simply dead, nothing wrong with that. Juan asked where the phone was, he was going to call the authorities and ask what should be done next. Before he had a chance to dial, another younger man came out of the other room. Juan turned to that woman and asked with a raised eyebrow who it was.
– This is your stepbrother.
Juan thought about that moment today at work. It had been years ago, but he realized that there was just so much he didn’t know about his father, about his mother, even about himself. He moved another piece of paper across his desk, from in box to out box, did his routine that made him the money that he handed over to his mother each month. Juan decided, knew that despite the one-item shopping list he’d slipped into his left front pants pocket, despite the routine of walking around the block, making up a silly excuse, the habit he’d accepted living with that woman, despite living his life in avoidance of trouble, of conflict, despite all those things and worse, or better, because of all of those things, he would not be going home this evening, nor tomorrow evening, nor ever again. There wasn’t another woman, (and Dolores would ask the name of the little tart were she given a chance), he just didn’t want to smell her any more.
Remember that you can, if you want, support this podcast on Patreon.
Cheers!
revel.
you're listening to radio revel 